Indian Institue of Management 2000 M.B.A CAT - Question Paper

idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the identical artist.
At the identical time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They
have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing
the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to provide up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why
abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism
thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist
legitimisation of the emerging revolutionary local patterns. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupationsa
survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were
with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance the Kandinsky-Klee
school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the
world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity.
Against this backdrop, we can identify 3 major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The 1st develops from a love of the earth, and
assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription
of the scene, but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The 2nd idiom
phrases its departures from symbolic and archetypal devices as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism
starts with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet,
the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The 3rd idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by gesture or allied with
formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here, sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random
expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure colour arrangements, vectordiagrammatic
spaces and gestural design.
In this genealogy, a few pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross -

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